U.S. v. Kyle: federal judge holds a warrantless month of plate-reader history unconstitutional

United States v. Melisa Susan Kyle, No. 4:26-cr-00189-SEH (N.D. Okla.), Document 62, Judge Sara E. Hill. A Tulsa County deputy who has served as a DEA task-force officer saw a rental Mazda with a California plate, followed it "for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate," and queried two plate-reader systems, Flock and VehicleManager. They returned about a month of the car's travel, including a short trip to the California/Arizona border and back. He stopped Kyle for following too closely, gave her a warning, and then held her for a dog sniff after she refused a search.

The court suppressed the evidence on two independent grounds. First, the stop was lawful, but the deputy extended it without reasonable suspicion. Second, the plate-reader search was itself a Fourth Amendment search, made without a warrant or probable cause. Reading Carpenter and Chatrie, the court held that drivers have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their physical movements," and called the networks "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance."

It is one district court. The order says it departs from "nearly every court examining the issue to date," including three other Oklahoma federal courts, and that neither the Tenth Circuit nor the Supreme Court has decided the question. As of Oct 9, 2026, the trial had been cancelled, Kyle was released on conditions, and no appeal had been filed.

How we know: Opinion and order read in full from the court record (Oct 9, 2026), with the docket. The evidence was suppressed on two independent grounds; the plate-reader holding is one of them. The 91 pounds of methamphetamine some outlets report is not in the order and is not used here. One district court; the government may still appeal.